Take the leap.

#Tether West Coast: Thanks!

I’m on my way home, from a week-long trip to Washington and Oregon. There are so much that I’ve heard, seen, tasted, and talked about in this (incredibly) long week. So much I want to share with the world.

Right now, though, it’s all this incoherent jumble in my head. So, I will try and tease it out bit by bit in multiple posts, tweets and status updates. Please bear with me and stay tuned…

Part I: TETHER: a roundtable about personal gravity

Our TETHER conversation events were a resounding success. I ended up having not just two, but many mini-conversations with my friends, attendees of World Domination Summit, which I attended over the weekend (and will write about separately, promise), strangers I met while eating at a food cart. At all of these conversations, I was struck by how everyone was consistently open to share their personal stories, game to play with the format that was unfamiliar to them, and respectful of one another.

Thank you. Not only was it gratifying for me to see everyone participate fully, but also everyone came up to me afterward how meaningful it was to experience such a conversation where real exchanges of ideas, thoughts and emotions happen.

Some take aways:

It’s okay to embrace the multi-dimensionality of your creativity. In fact, there’s a new word (and a movement) around this: multipotentiality. I met many a multipotentialites over this trip, but after thinking about it for a bit, I realized that in fact, most everyone around me is a multipotentialite. Having this awareness gives me lots of freedom in ways to approach our lives, I feel.

The paradox of choice. As more options become available around us, more we feel overwhelmed by the choices we have to make. Many expressed frustration in having to choose, and some suggested if there was a third way, where you could say “both, and…”

Risk and security. When you veer from the conventional path, the (perceived) risk gets bigger and bigger until you feel unable to take the action. “You need the courage to break out of the cage you create yourself with fear,” one attendee remarked.

Creation and sharing. A friend declared to me that “Making something just for me to enjoy by myself isn’t interesting to me; for me, it’s the sharing of my creative output that’s important.”

Context matters. When you change it, what you’re working on change, too.

Shiny new objects and perfectionism. Different people have different compulsions: Given the choice, do you perfect the details or move on to the next idea that excites you?

One step at a time. One attendee summed up our conversation thus: “Even the most shiny, new, exciting project requires many small, mundane, practical steps.”

The idea of introversion and extraversion—and the tension that exists between them in groups and within ourselves—was another topic that came up repeatedly at our conversations. “I lived with one idea of creativity in me for a long time before I realized that there was a quieter voice in me pulling me the other way” I remember an attendee telling the group at our first conversation in Portland. Another mentioned later that balancing the two voices require deep listening, awareness and practice.

People matter. Many expressed feelings of being stifled by catering to the people around them. When we choose “our audience,” do we listen to our own inclinations and needs, or do we just pick a “market?” Finding and surrounding ourselves with positive, encouraging people that let us be who we are, lets us go faster, and be more effective.

There’s so much more! If you were there and I missed your takeaways, please feel free to chime in below in the comments. Again, thanks so much for allowing us to continue hosting these events. Hope to see you (again) at the next roundtable!

Trackbacks

[…] is having a conversation. So to that end, I caught up with Megan Hunt, whom I met at WDS and TETHER Portland last month, for a impromptu video chat on her work as an entrepreneur with multiple businesses, and […]